


Miraculous Brothers

by gabrielandjackthenephilim



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adopted Children, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Lazarus Pit (DCU), Miraculous Team, Mominette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 16:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30075363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabrielandjackthenephilim/pseuds/gabrielandjackthenephilim
Summary: When the Guardian of the Miraculous Box Marinette Dupain-Cheng was planning ways to establish a new Miraculous Order, those plans involved bringing in responsible, driven adults, who were aware of the risks and old enough to accept them, to act as heroes and restore the world to its natural balance. Those plans did not include rescuing two traumatized children from the League of Assassins. Oh well. She's always trusted her instincts.
Kudos: 43





	1. The New Order

Marinette grinned as she carefully removed a part of the plaster on her wall and opened the safe containing the Miraculous Box. In the center of her room sat her suitcase and several duffel bags, packed to the brim. She had turned 18 a week ago and finally graduated the day before. She was ready to move on to the next stage in her life, both as herself and in her duties as Guardian. With the help of Chat Noir, Abeille, Viperion, Carapace, Rena Rouge, and Ryuko, Hawkmoth and Mayura had been defeated 2 months ago, and both the Butterfly and Peacock miraculous had been safely recovered. Her smile became softer with a tinge of sadness as she brushed her hand over the top of the box, remembering the fallout. 

In the years leading up to their final fight, her team had grown close. It had been nearly two years ago that they had all decided to reveal their identities, concluding it was necessary to spend more time meeting and planning, as well as provide cover and support for the other heroes (there was only so much you could do when you could only remain transformed for a half an hour tops before needing to detransform and let your Kwami rest). Knowing each other’s identities had strengthened their bond. Marinette, having already known the identity of most of the heroes, had been the one to propose the reveal, though it was agreed upon unanimously. She still remembered the shock of finding out that Adrien was Chat Noir. The two of them had sat down together privately afterwards and talked for a long time, both agreeing that as long as Hawkmoth was at large romance was out of the question. The trust that had built between them with their partnership grew as they became closer to one another in both of their identities, and she could honestly say that she had grown to love Adrien as a brother. She still cringed slightly when she thought back to the hormone fueled disaster that was her obsession with Adrien, before she had even really known him. 

Despite all of their planning, the identities of Hawkmoth and Mayura were still unknown when they had worked together to track a returning akuma. Marinette remembered the dread that settled in her stomach as they reached the Agreste manor, the uneasy looks shared between her teammates, the softly whispered “no” of Chat as he shook his head in wide eyed denial. They had found the hidden room, the body of Emilie Agreste, and had caught the villains by surprise. “Carapace, shield Chat!” Viperion had shouted, interrupting Hawkmoth’s rant about his wish and the need for their miraculouses. Rena Rouge created illusions of them as they all moved quickly throughout the room, making it impossible to identify the real teammates. Ryuko faced off with a sentimonster Mayura had conjured while Abeille snuck up on her from behind and paralyzed her before taking her miraculous.

“Nathalie!” Gabriel shouted, moving towards her, but Ladybug was on him the moment that he was distracted, removing his miraculous before twisting away and using her yoyo to fling herself out of reach. And just like that, it was over. Gabriel Agreste had wailed and pleaded, begging for the cat and ladybug miraculous so that he could save his wife.

“It can’t have been for nothing, it can’t, it can’t! You have to save her! SAVE HER!” He had screeched, tears trailing down his cheeks while the heroes watched horrified as he was led away in handcuffs. His assistant Nathalie had been silently crying, her face pale and lips still tinged blue as she entered the police car without uttering a word, before she suddenly doubled over coughing.

It was tat that point that a beeping noise filled the air and the team’s attention was drawn away from the arrest as their miraculous warned of their nearing detransformation. 

“Everyone regroup at the base!” Ladybug had shouted, grabbing her yoyo and swinging away from the gathering paparazzi. When she had reached the roof, she had turned back and saw to her relief that no one seemed to be following any members of her team, who had run off in different directions to detransform in private. To her horror, however, she saw Chat Noir, leaning on the doorway of the manor, making no move to leave, staring at the police cars. 

Her earrings beeped repeatedly but without hesitating she swung down and grabbed him around the waist, eliciting a surprised “oomph” as she swung away again, ignoring the shouted questions from the crowd. She had managed to get them hidden from sight seconds before their transformations fell and she was met with the blank, tearstained face of her partner.

“Oh, Adrien…” she said, tears welling up in her own eyes, and that was all it took for the blankness in his eyes to shatter. She held him as he broke down, years of neglect and anger and hurt pouring out as they held one another, the Kwamis snuggling against them and offering their own support. By the time they had stopped crying it was dark out and they were both exhausted.

“Tikki, spots on!” Marinette shouted, before giving Adrien, who still sat on the roof with his hands tightened around his legs and chin resting on his knees, a soft look of understanding.

“Come on Kitty. We need to let everyone know that we’re okay, then you can crash at my place.”

She held out her hand and waited patiently as Adrien took a shaky breath.

“Plagg, claws out!”

They didn’t speak as they moved through the city. People thronged the streets, cheering and hugging one another. When they reached the gym, owned by Kagami’s mother, which served as their secret base, they found the rest of the miraculous team already there. 

As soon as they walked through the door, Adrien was ambushed by Chloe, Nino, and Alya.

“Adrikins, I was so worried!”

“Dude, are you alright?”

“We’re here for you.”

Adrien had looked shocked and confused as they crowded around him, all of them hugging him at once. Over their heads he had made eye contact with Kagami, who had stopped mid-pace, and her whole body relaxed as they looked at one another. She walked over and tentatively fit herself between Alya and Chloe to wrap around him as well, calm as ever except for a slight trembling of her hands. Then his gave swiveled to Luka, who gave him a sad smile and strummed a few strings on his guitar. That had started the waterworks again, and Ladybug had watched from a distance, content to let her team finally vent their emotions without fear. They needed this, she knew.

Eventually, they had all calmed down. While most of the team was hugging and mumbling reassurances to one another she made her way over to Luka and sat beside him, basking in the peace that always seemed to surround him. 

“What happened?” She had asked quietly, noting the darkness behind his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. It had become tradition, after Viperion became a permanent member of the team, to let him tell her about the other timelines, the tragedies that only he could remember. It had been Chat Noir’s suggestion, a hesitant admittance of nightmares that still followed him about Ladybug’s many deaths that he hadn’t been able to prevent.

And Luka had continued strumming a few strings, avoiding her eyes as he talked about a father who realized his son was Chat Noir, of an akuma, a white suit, and a partner who was fighting a losing fight. And Marinette thought of the nightmares that she had nearly forgotten, of Chat Blanc and people that turned to dust.

That night they had all eventually parted ways with promises that they would meet again as soon as possible. Adrien stayed with Marinette and her family for his own protection, and it had been a week later that the team had finally reconvened, this time in Marinette’s room. They had all decided to return their miraculouses. They promised Marinette that she could call on them if they were ever needed but decided that with Hawkmoth gone they were all ready to devote themselves to normal lives. Kagami had gotten a scholarship to a fantastic college due to her renowned fencing talent. Chloe’s mother had invited her daughter to intern with her in America. Alya wanted to pursue journalism and Nino wanted to get more exposure as a DJ. And Adrien…Adrien wanted to start over. He informed them that he was changing his name to Leo Lareaux (they had teased him a bit about the name but he only smirked and said that he liked alliteration) and leaving France. He wanted to travel, to discover his actual likes and dislikes in a world not controlled by his father or colored by other people’s perception of him. He had promised to keep in touch and left soon after.

So here she was. Guardian of the Miraculous box, responsible for herself and 19 Kwamis. She had told her Maman and Papa that after graduation she wanted to spend some time traveling, borrowing Adrien’s explanation. It was only partly a lie. She planned to leave the next day and travel to her new base using Kaalki, the teleportation Kwami. She was planning to establish a new Miraculous Order and travel the world, restoring balance where humans had tipped the scale too far. Once she had others to share the responsibility with, she was going to work as “a designer who liked her privacy” to prevent suspicion and fund any of her new team’s hero work. MDC had already become world renowned and the money she made from commissions was enough for her to live comfortably. 

Creating the base had been surprisingly easy. She had bought a large apartment complex in New York, investing nearly all of her saved commission money (4 years as the exclusive designer for multiple celebrities had left her quite well off financially). The lower half of the building was a fabric store with a large workspace in the back where she could still complete commissions while also running a business out of the front. Above the store were empty apartments that she hoped permanent miraculous users would use when she had built a new Miraculous Order out of responsible adults who were ready and willing to pick up the mantle. Between the apartments and the fabric store there was a wide-open area. She had considered keeping it as a second floor of the fabric store but had ultimately decided to turn it into a common space/meeting room instead. It had tables, couches, chairs, games, a TV, and whiteboards. Many whiteboards (she may have become slightly obsessed with them when investigating Hawkmoth). In any case, after a good deal of scouting, she had decided the apartment complex was the perfect place to hide in plain sight, rather than going off to build or find a temple in the mountains. She had always loved the city and that wasn’t going to change, even if she was ready to leave Paris behind. Naturally, there were added safety measures, however.

When she had become what she subconsciously viewed as an adult, her powers had become stronger. Tikki had explained to her that the miraculous powers were founded on abstract concepts. As long as she considered herself a child, the powers treated her like one. With the theoretical miraculous training wheels removed, the power of creation had become much stronger, as well as more precise. It helped too that Marinette was the first true Ladybug wielder Tikki had ever encountered. They bonded almost perfectly, like soulmates. While past wielders of the Ladybug miraculous had been decent fits, none would have been able to access and control Tikki’s power like Marinette. Later as Ladybug Marinette had used occult symbols from the Grimoire that she had taken back after Hawkmoth’s defeat to ward and protect the building from anyone with the intention of harm. It would prevent entry from anyone who sought to steal or damage anything in the building, or with the intention to hurt anyone who was inside. She also added spells that would repel and confuse people who were looking for a miraculous. She and Tikki had both slept for nearly a day afterwards.

Marinette, with her newly attuned senses and capabilities, was excited to fulfill Ladybug’s original purpose, maintaining balance in the world. Tikki and the other Kwamis told her stories about the Order’s work, about past villains, and past heroes, about abominations called Lazarus Pits that the Order had been trying to track down and destroy for centuries before Fu had destroyed the Temple. Marinette could sense them, even though she was nowhere near one, and all of the Kwamis had been united in their disgust that the pits existed.

“But Tikki,” Marinette had asked, “How are any of the Lazarus Pits still active? If it was the Order’s mission to destroy them, why are they still here?”

Tikki had become very serious at the question and tension had risen among the Kwami’s, hot and heavy.

“Our holders were people Marinette. And just like you had Master Fu, they had their own masters who they were loyal to. There was a very powerful man named Ra’s al Ghul. He was strong and deadly, and he used the Lazarus pits to live for a very long time. He claimed he wanted to eliminate the evils of humanity, to bring perfect justice to the world. There were many in the Order who agreed with him, including miraculous holders. Some of his followers were accepted into the Order, some he converted. He tried to use his influence to protect the pits, as well as fight others who he saw as a threat to his organization. Of course, the only ones who could actually damage the pits were Plagg or me.”

“The holders would look the other way, pretend they couldn’t find the pits or lie and say that they had been destroyed,” Plagg added, his nose scrunched in disgust. “Anytime there was a new Ladybug or Chat Noir he would find them and persuade them to his side. He gained a following, called them the League of Assassins. They killed anyone who demonstrated ‘the evils of humanity.’ And for the miraculous holders who held out hope for people or refused to listen to him, horrible things happened to the people they cared about. Not that it could be tied back to the League, of course, but we always suspected.”

“My last wielder, Hippolyta, was one of my strongest Ladybugs. She truly believed in the good inside of people and was determined to maintain balance in the world to protect them. But Ra’s al Ghul kept insisting that she was too naïve, that all people had evil in their hearts. One day she came across a group of women who had been enslaved, beaten, raped, and then killed. She was so distraught by the hatred of man that she used my magic to bring them all back to life and create an island called Themyscira where they could live forever, isolated and immortal, far away from the evils that Ra’s al Ghul insisted surrounded her. The cost of the creation was a new type of Kwami, war embodied, that would wreak destruction on mankind until balance was restored. It’s still loose,” Tikki said, eyes filling with tears as she remembered the devastation of her friend. 

“But no matter what he said or did, he never could use a miraculous,” Plagg disclosed, nose turning up.

“He had used the Lazarus Pit too much. His soul was completely corrupted, there was nothing for us to bond with,” Tikki nodded, sniffling.

Marinette was horrified. 

“If the Lazarus Pits still exist, is it possible he’s still alive?” She had asked worriedly.

“Don’t worry Marinette. If he is, you’ll have all of us to protect you. And I know you’ll do the right thing. After all these years of akuma attacks, you still always forgive the victims no matter what sorts of terrible things they do. You see the good in people and you know their hearts. He wouldn’t be able to take that from you,” Tikki had said firmly.

Remembering the conversation, Marinette took a deep breath and swallowed her nerves, brushing the Miraculous Box once more before placing it back in the safe and closing it again. 

“Tikki?” She asked with a lilt in her voice, cocking her head to the side, knowing that the Kwami was nearby even if she couldn’t see her.

“Yes Marinette?” Tikki chirped immediately, smiling brightly as she appeared, hovering beside Marinette’s head. 

“How about one more patrol as Ladybug?” Marinette said, a real grin lighting up her face, causing her eyes to crinkle as she walked towards her balcony. Tikki cheered.

“Tikki, spots on!” Marinette shouted, and then Ladybug was swinging across Paris. 

In a hidden base in the mountains, a woman stormed out of a room, slamming the door behind her. A man smiled, unperturbed, the light green glow from a large pit casting shadows across his face.

“Finally.” 


	2. Destroying the Lazarus Pits

Marinette stumbled out of the portal with a groan, collapsing on the ground and throwing her arms out in exhaustion. 

“Tikki, spots off,” she groaned as she detransformed. Tikki, Plagg, and Kaalki collapsed beside her, heaving for breath. They had all decided that when she released Tikki the others were free to leave the miraculous as well. Time for recharging could be precious, especially if they were in a battle, and the Kwamis were aware of everything that happened even if they could not communicate directly with Marinette, so they agreed if she did not tell them to help her remain transformed, they were free to go.

“So. Many. Swords.” Marinette whimpered, pulling one of her arms over her eyes, wincing as the movement stretched the bruises that covered nearly every inch of her body.

“Marinnnnneeettttte, I need cheese,” Plagg whined, widening his eyes plaintively as he rolled over to look at her.

“In the minifridge,” she grumbled, not moving.

“Unbelievable. And after I was so helpful corroding those swords after using the cataclysm on the Lazarus Pit and not even making you detransform, my talents are wasted on you…”

“There’s Camembert.”

Plagg immediately stopped complaining, shooting up from the floor and across the room in seconds.

Marinette had left home a week ago and so far they had destroyed three of the Lazarus Pits, two of them in Switzerland and one in England. Originally, she had been wary of wearing all three Kwamis but Tikki had reassured her. They trusted her not to give into temptation and use a wish. Instead, she used the power of Voyage to enter the League’s bases, because yes, the League of Assassins still existed and Ra’s al Ghul was still alive, thank you very much. She would then use cataclysm to destroy the Lazarus Pit. While Tikki’s cure could make the Pit disappear, they didn’t know what sort of destruction would occur to balance the power. The Pits themselves were the result of Plagg driving the dinosaurs to extinction. After the worldwide destruction, creation magic had settled at the core of the Earth, bubbling to the surface along ley lines and forming the Pits. Over time, the creation magic drew destruction and rot like a magnet, reaching its own natural yet overpowered equilibrium.

When humans used the Lazarus Pit, the creation magic healed them but destruction magic transferred to them as well, leading many of them prone to fits of rage or insanity. Plagg’s cataclysm still worked as a perfect opposite to the creation magic. After Plagg destroyed the pit, Ladybug would use her Lucky Charm to keep the assassins back and then the miraculous cure to purify the area, dispelling the chaos left by the sudden loss of creation magic and restoring natural balance. By the time she escaped with Voyage, the spot where the mystical Lazarus Pit had formed was a regular spot without any esoteric quality.

Gingerly, Marinette pushed herself off the floor and walked over to her desk to get cookies and sugar cubes for her Kwamis. She walked back over to them and sat the plate between them, laughing a little as they practically devoured the snacks.

“You should take a break Marinette,” Tikki said, cookie crumbs falling off her cheeks as she rose to hover earnestly in front of her friend’s face.

“It took the Order almost 75 years to destroy three Lazarus Pits and you did the same amount of work in a week. You need to look after your health. I know how excited you are to fulfill your duties as Guardian, but you don’t need to do this alone. Wait until you have a team who can watch your back so that you don’t get hurt!”

“Spots is right,” Plagg nodded, swallowing a large chunk of cheese.

“They’ve been left alone for the last 150 years; it won’t hurt to leave them for a few more.”

“But what if it does?” Marinette countered agitatedly, good mood gone. She stood and began to pace, her distress clear on her face. 

“As long as the League of Assassins is standing, people are going to die. They may actually be worse than Hawkmoth. And the Lazarus Pits fall under the jurisdiction of the Guardian.”

Tikki watched sympathetically as her holder dissolved into nonsensical mutterings as she paced and tugged on her pigtails. Her holder was so young. Exhaustion left bags beneath her eyes, and when she had worked and stressed herself to her limit, in the rare cases she would finally succumb to sleep, it was a deep unconsciousness that left her with a tight face and no dreams. She missed the Marinette who tossed and turned, smiling and mumbling in her sleep about Adrien and hamsters. Since they had moved to New York she hadn’t seen Marinette so much as touch her sketchbook that she loved so much, nor had she worked on any outfits that weren’t a part of a pre-existing commission. She hadn’t even explored the city! Human lives were so short. Even if Marinette’s had been extended some by her connection as Guardian and Ladybug, Tikki wanted her to enjoy the life she had. She couldn’t keep going like this. Something would have to give, and Tikki’s heart broke to think of her precious holder, her perfect match, changing herself and losing that light in her eyes that Fu had recognized, the light that shone from her creative and loving soul. Marinette loved with everything she was. Tikki would never forgive herself if this position they had persuaded her to accept, no, coerced her into, destroyed her.

Suddenly there was a shift in the air, like a string pulled taut. Marinette and the Kwamis stiffened as one. 

“Tikki?” Marinette questioned warily, glancing at the wide eyed Kwami.

“We’re being summoned,” Tikki replied to the unasked question, gaze unfocused. 

“We don’t have to respond, but it’s probably unwise to ignore them,” her gaze suddenly snapped back into focus, looking at Marinette.

“It’s Ra’s al Ghul. I recognize the magical signature.”

There was silence as the four of them stood still, contemplating what that implied.

“Well then,” Marinette said finally, eyes sharpening with determination as her shoulders loosened, instinctively positioning herself so that she was prepared to fight, her bruises from her previous battle already invisible, “let’s go meet the Demon Head.”  



End file.
